tory" are unimportant and out of view. The pictures arise distinct,
unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on
our eyes between sleeping and waking. Fantastic, too, but with more of a
recognisable human setting, is "Golden Wings," which to a slight degree
reminds one of Theophile Gautier's _Chateau de Souvenir_.

"The apples now grow green and sour
Upon the mouldering castle wall,
Before they ripen there they fall:
There are no banners on the tower,

The draggled swans most eagerly eat
The green weeds trailing in the moat;
Inside the rotting leaky boat
You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."

These, with "The Sailing of the Sword," are my own old favourites. There
was nothing like them before, nor will be again, for Mr. Morris, after
several years of silence, abandoned his early manner. No doubt it was
not a manner to persevere in, but happily, in a mood and a moment never
to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris did fill a fresh page in English
poetry with these imperishable fantasies. They were absolutely neglected
by "the reading public," but they found a few staunch friends. Indeed, I
think of "Guenevere" as FitzGerald did of Tennyson's poems before 1842.
But this, of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious,
estimate. Criticism may aver that the influence of Mr. Rossetti was
strong on Mr. Morris before 1858. Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris
first (as the world read the "Lay" before "Christabel"), and my own
preference is for Mr. Morris.

It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, in
1866 or 1867, "The Life and Death of Jason." Young men who had read
"Guenevere" hastened to purchase it, and, of course, found themselves in
contact with something very unlike their old favourite. Mr. Morris had
told a classical tale in decasyllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort,
and he regarded the heroic age from a mediaeval point of view; at all
events, not from an historical and archaeological point of view. It was
natural in Mr. Morris to "envisage" the Greek heroic age in this way, but
it would not be natural in most other writers. The poem is not much
shorter than the "Odyssey," and long narrative poems had been out of
fashion since "The Lord of the Isles" (1814).

All this was a little disconcerting. We read "Jason," and read it with
pleasure, but without much of the more essential pleasure which comes